Cultivated Compendium

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has ruled that five New Orleans police officers are entitled to a new trial after being convicted of shooting six unarmed civilians on the Danziger Bridge in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Frontline's Sarah Moughty and Sarah Childress report. The unarmed group of civilians was searching for food and medicine.

A new trial was granted because federal prosecutors violated the fair trial rights of the police officers by writing negative comments online about the police officers. The Fifth Circuit upheld that ruling.

Last week, BloombergBusiness' Natalie Kitroeff had a piece with a title sure to grab your attention: "Are Lawyers Getting Dumber?" However, the piece is really about a stupendous drop in the rate of law school graduates who are passing the bar exam. For example, bar passage rates dropped by 9 percentage points or more in Delaware, Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas in 2014.

National Conference of Bar Examiners' Erica Moeser says the student body that sat for the July 2014 exam were less prepared than the body that sat for the July 2013 exam. She told Kitroeff "underqualified law grads don’t deserve to pass the bar just because they earned a J.D. Her role, she says, is to protect consumers."

However, some critics point to the glitch in the ExamSoft software that cause thousands of test takers to get error messages when trying to upload their exams in 2014. Yet pass rates were down across the board in states that used ExamSoft and those that didn't, Kitroeff reports.

Moeser also argues that law schools have lowered their standards to admit students who aren't going to qualify for the bar: "''You’ve got this underclass in law schools who are really keeping the lights on but not reaping the benefit.'"

The District of Columbia Circuit has unanimously upheld regulations to extend minimum wage and overtime protections to workers who take care of the elderly and the disabled in their homes, The New York Times' Noam Scheiber reports. The Obama administration enacted regulations to end an exemption from overtime and minimum wage laws for home-care workers.

Now that lawmakers in Alaska have voted to sue to try to block that state's expansion of Medicaid to 40,000 low-income adults, they will have to show irreparable harm will result if a preliminary injunction isn't granted against the expansion, APRN-Anchorage's Annie Feidt reports.

Legislators are arguing that the expansion needs to have their approval, that the population that would be covered by the expansion is not a mandatory group that must get health insurance coverage, and Gov. Bill Walker violated separation of powers by unilaterally authorizing the expansion.

The Associated Press' Becky Bohrer reports that the expansion would be for "people ages 19 to 64 who are not caring for dependent children, not disabled and not pregnant, and who earn up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level."

The number of foreclosure cases in New York State are not letting up, The New York Law Journal's Joel Stashenko reports. Stashenko was reporting on Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli's report that the number of new foreclosure filings in the state is only down by 6 percent between 2013 and 2014. DiNapoli attributed the fall in the number of cases to court rules designed to end problematic foreclosure practices by lenders.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has ruled that an Ohio woman can pursue a claim that Blue Ash, Ohio, discriminated against her disabled daughter by banning her from keeping a miniature horse as a service animal, The Wall Street Journal's Jacob Gershman reports. Ingrid Anderson claims the city's ban on people keeping farm animals within municipal limits violates the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Fair Housing Act. Anderson further argues the city should make a reasonable accommodation to allow her family to keep the miniature hourse.

A federal judge ruled earlier this month that the Food and Drug Administration can't bar a drug company from promoting an unapproved use for its pills derived from fish oil, The Washington Post's Carolyn Johnson reports. U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer ruled that the First Amendment protects Amarin Corp. "'truthful and non-misleading speech'" in promoting a use of its pills that has not been approved by federal regulators.
 

Civil rights lawyers from the Department of Justice have lambasted a law in Boise, Idaho, that bans people who are homeless from sleeping in public places, The Washington Post's Emily Badger says. The DOJ said in a court filing such laws are unconstitutional when there aren't enough beds for homeless people to sleep indoors: "' When adequate shelter space does not exist, there is no meaningful distinction between the status of being homeless and the conduct of sleeping in public. Sleeping is a life-sustaining activity — i.e., it must occur at some time in some place. If a person literally has nowhere else to go, then enforcement of the anti-camping ordinance against that person criminalizes her for being homeless.'"

The Connecticut Supreme Court, 4-3, has ruled that the state's death penalty is unconstitutional for inmates who were already sentenced to death, The Huffington Post's Kim Bellware reports. Legislators already repealed the death penalty for future crimes.

The majority ruled that execution of inmates who committed capital felonies prior to April 2012 would violate the state's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Arkansas, Kentucky, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington all have had a 10-percentage-point reduction in their rates of citizens who don't have health insurance, Gallup's Dan Witters reporst. Seven of the 10 states that have had the greatest reductions in uninsured rates have expanded Medicaid and established a "state-based marketplace exchange or state-federal partnership."